he said. All my life I’ve wondered what Jesus must have been looking at when Satan tempted him the third time. Now I know. The land. All the kingdoms of the world.
* * *
By the winter of 1990, Dodge City was again an open town. You could sense it driving in from the east. The population had grown by a third since I’d left, most of it made up of young men come north from Texas and Mexico to work in the newly built packing plants. Like the cowboys of old, they are mercurial and often well armed. Roughly a million cattle a year are slaughtered at Dodge City. The Roundup Rodeo, which headlines the annual Dodge City Days celebration, has grown from a small, local affair to one of the richest on the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association circuit. It is as if the Old West, that brief period in the town’s storied past, has returned, big as life in the twentieth century.
Of course the Old West always was about blood and money. The town got its start, after all, as a group of tents straddling a muddy lane, five easy miles from the army outpost to whose soldiers it sold whiskey, women, and the small hope of a world away from Indian fighting and the rolling monotony of the high plains. When the railroad arrived in 1872, the tents were replaced by false-fronted wooden shanties. Buffalo hunters, greased with blood, rolled into town aboard wagonloads of wooly black hides, the likes of which were already stacked ten and twenty feet high next to the depot. There’s a picture of a man, Charles Rath, sitting atop a stack of forty thousand such hides that appears in all histories of Dodge. Behind him, just out of the picture, is the depot, and across from that is the Long Branch Saloon. Evidently there was something about a day spent in killing that required a shot of whiskey come nightfall; the founders of Dodge City understood this and built a big part of their business plan around it.
When the Indians were contained and the buffalo killed off, a new source of income, a second boom, rumbled on the southern horizon. Giant herds of Texas longhorns, banned by the bigger railroad towns to the east, began to replace the scalp-and-hide business as the town’s chief bad smell and most recent reason-to-be. Like the soldiers and the buffalo hunters before them, the pimpled, adolescent cowboys who came north with the herds were bored, thirsty, and easily separated from their money. Hence the sharks—the professional gamblers, pimps, and hired guns—who also appeared, like horseflies on the stacked buffalo hides of old.
In the first year of its existence, Dodge City buried seventeen men, all of whom died “with their boots on.” Probably three-quarters of its women were prostitutes, or “soiled doves,” as the frontier papers called them; more than half of its buildings, saloons. Dubbed The Queen of the Cowtowns by its first class of merchant-citizens, the town went by a different name in the eastern papers: The Wickedest Little City in the West. Drive into town today and there’s a sign that offers yet another moniker: Dodge City, Kansas—Cowboy Capital of the World.
It didn’t last, of course. Even as the “better folk” in the town—the farmers, the merchants, and their wives—were busy crying out for the end of lawlessness, the boom, like all things, was ending of its own accord. In time, the false-fronted wooden shanties of old were replaced, first by brick buildings and finally by gleaming white grain elevators. These were what Truman Capote noticed above all else when he rolled into town to research In Cold Blood. Grain elevators rising like Greek temples on the plains. Prairie skyscrapers. Big white pencils busily erasing the Old West of yore.
Yet many would be the times when in the safety of their hard, honest work, the farmer-merchants of Dodge would look back with longing on a past their ancestors had deplored. They were helped along in their nostalgia by the Great Depression, several Hollywood films, and a radio and television drama that twisted the truth beyond recognition, making them the heroes and putting the town’s name once again on the lips of strangers.
That was the first omen of things to come. The second was when the town, seeing money to be made, had a replica of old Front Street put up for the tourist trade, causing some to believe that this newly built facade was the real Front Street, that the past was not gone, and that the West still lived in the red brick streets of a little farming burg. They didn’t realize that when the West came again it would not be here, but on the kill floors of Excel Corporation and National Beef.
Ironically, these modern packing plants were built five miles east of town, just west of where the old fort stood during Indian fighting days. It is here the herds come to, in trucks now instead of by hoof. It is here where the hides pile up, waiting to be turned into baseball gloves and patent leather shoes. And it is here where the young men arrive (young women, too), in beat-up cars with Texas plates, seeking work on a butcher’s assembly line.
If the Old West was about blood and money, the New West is about return. Prodigal son comes home to save the ranch, discover his ancestry, spark an old flame. In the process, he finds himself, who he is in the here and now. As I pull into town, I note all of the changes like paragraphs on a page. The widened streets, the cattle trucks, the bars along Wyatt Earp Boulevard with names like Las Palmas, La Lampara, Nuestra Familia.
A New West has come to Old Dodge City, I think with a laugh. Am I the only one who likes this one better?
* * *
Of my six brothers, four became lawyers, one a day trader, and one a general contractor—not a farmer or rancher among us. If you’re thinking this is a source of disappointment for our father, think again. From the first, he actively discouraged us from seeking a future in farming or ranching. Not that he had to try too hard. The truth was, most of us hated farming. We’d seen too many wheat fields ruined by hail or drought, too many years taken off the old man’s life by work and worry. Ranching was just as bad—a babysitting job that never ended, cattle out at midnight or in a deadly winter storm. And yet, as happens to many who leave the farming life behind, there was something in all of us that felt lost, in exile, vaguely end-of-the-line. Sitting behind desks in Dodge City or Kansas City or Buffalo, New York, we might find ourselves, at odd moments, staring at summer fields still visible beyond the highway. In conversation with one another, we would lapse into the old way of talking. Remember when you almost ran over me with the sweep plow? What were we—twelve or fourteen? Remember the time all the cattle got out in the blizzard? How cold it was? With a mixture of self-regard and scorn, we’d look at our own children and remark how easy they had it, how soft they were.
To our father, we must have seemed more soft still. Born during the Great Depression to parents he never knew, he was saved from the orphanage by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who kept him in their hospital dormitory until he was adopted by a German-Catholic farm family. His childhood consisted of long days of hard work, nights spent listening to radio reports of World War II. And yet, to hear him talk, these were days of glory and heaven. “We used to shovel wheat into the granary by hand,” he’d say. “Of course, it was four dollars a bushel back then . . .”
Our mother, by contrast, grew up in the city with a mother and stepfather who knew nothing of farm life. Her biological father, it was said, had come from ranching people, but that was neither here nor there. Her parents divorced when she was still a baby, and she didn’t meet the man until many years later, when she was married and had a family of her own. When asked about him today, all she will say is, “We were better off without him.”
Of these things our parents never spoke. Family meant mostly what they had built on their own. Our childhood was designed to prove the past wrong, and in large part, it did just that. We were happy, prosperous, destined for bigger things. In our kitchen hung a painting of the family tree: a real tree, healthy and young, with a different branch for each of us and on each branch a child, his birthday, the color of his hair and eyes. As the family grew, so did the web of our belonging. The oldest paved the way for the youngest in a world alive to the sound of our name. At school it would be, “Ah, yes, I had your brother for math,” or, “You know, your father went here as a boy,” an aged nun smiling down on us as if she were somehow part of the family, too. Years later, I recall being in my parents’ house over the
